Greg Berlanti is in charge of a lot of superhero shows on television. He is a literal superhero. He is absolutely brilliant.
When I was in high school, I was so in love – as I should have been – with the performance aspect of theater and just the literal act of performing.
I did have a literal shed of fan mail once. It was literally filled with, like, 25 of those giant mail cartons.
The literal resurrection of every soul who has lived and died on earth is a certainty, and surely one should make careful preparation for this event. A glorious resurrection should be the goal of every man and woman, for resurrection will be a reality.
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.
I used to be very figurative and also just kind of scared to talk about the way I felt in a literal way.
Drama is not a literal portrayal of events. It’s a depiction, it’s impressionistic.
People pay far too much attention to the television and they’re quite literal in some ways. At the beginning, when I was playing very stupid characters, I think people genuinely thought I was possibly quite dim-witted myself, which is a compliment in some ways, as I must have been doing my job very well.
When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.
In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages – en masse.
The expressive body is not literal; it’s very primal, and that’s what I feel when I make the best of my work. It’s coming from a primal place rather than an intellectual place.
I love historical fiction because there’s a literal truth, and there’s an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association.
I think that ‘Station to Station’ is a nomadic project not only in a literal sense, as it’s traveling by train from place to place. Some of these places are New York City or Los Angeles, but some of these places are rather off-the-grid places.
Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn’t done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can’t just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.
Things have to be believable, not in a literal, photographic sense, but in an emotional sense – capturing the essence of the situation.
It’s not in my nature to be too literal.
If people call my book an actor’s memoir I will be very upset. I can’t bear anything too literal, so it has elements of truth and elements of fiction sitting side by side.
Young writers reasonably say, ‘I don’t know what to write about,’ so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.
‘Find Me’ I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that’s growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there’s an aspect of the supernatural.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don’t have to fake it.
Melted down, silver is worth a little more than four dollars an ounce. But carved, inlaid, and engraved, and identified with a particular year, it becomes the direct reflection, often the literal record, of human history, our movement through time.
Balanchine was just able to strike the balance between literal narrative and abstract dance.
There are parts on ‘Wind’s Poem’ that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.
You can’t have whatever you want. But to a child who must ask permission for every single thing, adulthood looks like a constant parade of every desire’s satisfaction. It is a heady and terrifying place. It is the Otherworld. It is Fairyland. In fantasy, we make this literal.
To me, the best writing points to something literal or common but is also nuanced: The moment when somebody is telling you they love you while simultaneously disappointing you. Everybody’s experienced that.
Cross-pollination and ‘contamination’ is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it’s a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn’t fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.
It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets – all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
God truly is our Father, the Father of the spirits of all mankind. We are his literal offspring and are formed in his image. We have inherited divine characteristics from him.
I’ve always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.
I have yet to find a faithful tithe payer who cannot testify that in a very literal and wonderful way the windows of Heaven have been opened and blessings have been poured out upon him or her.
The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear – a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
The problem with copyright is it only protects that literal work. It doesn’t protect the design and the ideas. That’s unfortunate.
Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the ‘salon painters’ who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.
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